Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops

I remember a famous academic study in the nineties that questioned whether PC's really produced any appreciable return on investment.

Course that would be so laughable today that no scientific journal would publish it. This article is similar in quality. Got to give it to the anti GMO folks they never give up, even after its clear that they've lost.

I worked in agriculture for over twenty years as an agronomist. I wasn't in an ivory tower, I was on the ground walking farmers fields. My customers used less insecticides with the introduction of GMO seed. They used much safer herbicides. Farmers work in an extremely low margin business. They continued to buy GMO seed because it made them more money. Farmers are the original environmentalists and the use of GMO seed was cleaning their community.

In America we spend around 11% of our income on food. In Europe it's more than double that number. In Europe a small but loud group of activists prevented the adoption of GMO seed. They destroyed research crops so that tests could never be completed on the efficacy of GMO seed.

https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/06/11/bbc-panora...

Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain. Let people starve cause hypothetically something could be bad for them is the height of hypocrisy.

http://www.economist.com/node/1337197

If they [the environmentalists] lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 60 years, they’d be crying out for fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation canals and tractors and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

- Norman Borlaug, inventor of the green revolution and winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace prize

This is true if not somewhat misleading. Most commercial GMO crops do not target yield but lessens the amount of effort required to maintain production. Similar yields are readily achievable by throwing manpower and tons of agrochemicals at it, however that is effectively a loss of productivity and just as bad for the environment.

Ultimately one can only fit so many plants of maize on a single acre. What is yet to come are GM crops that actually prove the efficiency of photosynthesis and carbon fixing by directly engineering cellular biochemistry, making them closer to the food factory mankind has been working towards for thousands of years.

Criticism that GMOs have "not accelerated increases in crop yields" misses the point. If you pick weeds by hand, even organic farming can have great yields!

Are GMOs making food cheaper to produce? The answer is almost certainly yes -- otherwise farmers wouldn't be buying the more expensive GMO seeds, which now dominate the market for many crops.

Also, there are some crops (e.g., the Hawaiian papaya) that wouldn't even be viable today without GMOs.

Disclaimer: I used to work for a company that was acquired by Monsanto.

That's remarkable. Tons more pesticides and herbicides for no actual improvement in crop yields.

Annoyingly, the NYT article focuses repeatedly on bullshit "health" controversies, ignoring the actual reasons that GMOs are largely banned in the EU - namely, their environmental risks. It's extremely strange how virtually nobody on any side of the debate in America or in the media seems to be aware of this.

> "Monsanto pitched them as a way to curb the use of its pesticides. “We’re certainly not encouraging farmers to use more chemicals,” a company executive told The LA Times in 1994..."Figures from the United States Department of Agriculture show herbicide use skyrocketing in soybeans, a leading G.M. crop, growing by two and a half times in the last two decades"

As a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. We could have plants that eliminated the need for petroleum based fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover does and that are resistant to disease and insects. Instead we get Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops. And lie to us about their GMO's reducing the use of chemicals.

It's a shame Monsanto has abused the potential of GMO to boost profits by selling more chemicals instead of using it for good.

I'm not sure we should get our science from the UN. It's a political institution. Take with a grain of salt. I'm sure the relative yields of GMO vs non-GMO crops is a well studied topic. What's the consensus? Or is it simply too political to even do objective research in this area. Not a good situation.

The problem is with the ease of use. If you can apply roundup all-around the season, you do so. And if you do, some undesirable plants will survive, hidden out of sight. These will adapt and thus, genetically modified crops "breed" multi-pesticide resistant weeds.

In the traditional approach to farming this did happen only seldom, because the times when pesticides were applied, are severely limited. And if resistant weeds where encountered, a change of the grown culture and apply of broad-band pesticides could eliminate them.

TL,DR; Genetically Modified Crops grow resistant weeds that drastically reduce the harvest.

GMO + broadcast applied herbicides is a long term loser. For years cotton growers in the South Eastern US applied Round Up from planes. The chemical would dissipate on its way down and apply half doses to weeds. Some of these weeds could metabolize the Round Up while others would die. But the next year all that was left were the weeds that had some resistance. They bred w/ e/o and on it went. The annual selective pressure has created some pretty impressive weeds, most notably Palmer Amaranth. Growers I've talked to say, "Round up just pisses it off." It can grow over an inch a day, it has over a million seeds in its bud and once it has grown past 4 inches, no selective chemical can kill it. You can kill 98% of it one year and its population will be bigger the next year. Once you get an Amaranth population, you more or less can't get rid of it. It's a one way ratchet. As such, Palmer Amaranth is spreading.

The Dicamba story is quite interesting. Monsanto is selling Dicamba resistant seeds even though the chemical is not approved for use on those crops. As Dicamba is approved for other uses, growers can buy the Dicamba ready seeds and illegally apply it. Dicamba is finicky. In many weather conditions it volatilizes and drifts to a neighboring farm. If the neighbor doesn't have Dicamba ready seeds, he could lose his crop and have very little legal recourse. Today two growers got in a dispute about Dicamba drift and one shot and killed the other. The drift problem is forcing growers that don't use Dicamba to buy Dicamba resistant seeds as a defense mechanism. It's pretty nuts. I feel like the herbicide resistant weed problem is like a "Global Warming that nobody knows about."

More interesting is the fact that it takes decades to produce a gene / chemical pairing and get it approved for use. The weeds evolve faster than the GMO / chemical companies' ability to deliver new products.

The startup I work for, Blue River Technology, is going after this problem. We make machines that detect the crop, detect the weeds and apply non-selective chemicals to just the weeds. Because we target selectively we can use non-systemic, contact herbicides will kill resistant weeds no matter what. The grower saves on chemicals, put orders of magnitude less poison in the ground and gets better weed control.

The problems w/ this article are numerous. The guy clearly spent more time looking at UN stats than he did walking the fields and talking w/ growers. Somehow he missed the rather obvious fact that GMO + roundup is more cost effective regardless of yield. Regardless, he brought up some interesting points and I'd rather be talking about it than not.

-- Disclaimer -- The company I work for is partially funded by both Monsanto and Syngenta. Not that anything I said is defending the status quo :)

Kevin folta breaks down the flaws in the article pretty well:

"1. No genes for yield were ever installed. The current suite of biotech traits were not meant to improve yields, they were made to ensure yields. In other words, they help ag producers farm with lower costs, fewer insecticides, improved weed control and virus resistance in some cases. Same yield at lower cost = better for farmers."

https://kfolta.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/rehashing-tired-argume...

Shun the unbeliever. Shun him.

The article says that their research found "genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields." Yields have been on an upward trend for 50+ years.

I'm not going to comment for or against GMOs or whatever. But can we all take a minute to appreciate the staggering stupidity of the CEO of Monsanto saying:

"Every farmer is a smart businessperson, and a farmer is not going to pay for a technology if they don’t think it provides a major benefit"

This is a) obviously more marketing than anything, pandering to his customers b) Demonstrably false. It's simply untrue that every farmer is a smart businessperson. c) Besides the point. What the farmers "think" is not the same as what's real.